I've been reading about Plex, and how you can reroute some DNS dealies or something, and click on the "trailers" icon on appletv to access your files.
Basically my parents have this gigantic DVD collection that just collects dust and takes up a whole lot of space. I was thinking I'd try to make their lives a little easier and more efficient.
What I've pieced together, which is quite likely not the case and I'm misinterpreting somethingis that I could take rip all these DVDs to an external hard drive or an NAS (using something called Handbrake I think), plug my drive/server into my router, and use Plex to access all of it via appletv. Is this at all doable? Am I completely missing something?
Is Plex user friendly? Could I upload cover art, descriptions, and subtitles for everything? Could I have separate folders and categories? If I have 10 seasons of Friends, can I have a separate folder for each season? Is Handbrake easy to use?
More importantly, is it super easy to use once everything is set up? Will my parents be able to access their library of movies as easily as they do stuff on Netflix via appletv? Is the technology not quite there yet?
Lastly, if none of the above is possible, is there a different method to this that could work?
For what it's worth, I have a very solid home internet connection. I'd be connecting the hard drive to the Airport Extreme in my room, and the appletv would be connected via ethernet to the Airport Express running on Bridge Mode in my living room.
I'm not totally inept when it comes to technology. It's just that a lot of this media server stuff, including all the guides I've read and so-called "beginner" tutorials, feature a lot of jargon specific to this topic, and it gets to be overwhelming trying to piece it all together.
tl;dr: I'm curious if there's a way to access files on an external hard drive connected to a router on an appletv via plex or other means. And also what this program called Handbrake is about.
Basically my parents have this gigantic DVD collection that just collects dust and takes up a whole lot of space. I was thinking I'd try to make their lives a little easier and more efficient.
What I've pieced together, which is quite likely not the case and I'm misinterpreting somethingis that I could take rip all these DVDs to an external hard drive or an NAS (using something called Handbrake I think), plug my drive/server into my router, and use Plex to access all of it via appletv. Is this at all doable? Am I completely missing something?
Is Plex user friendly? Could I upload cover art, descriptions, and subtitles for everything? Could I have separate folders and categories? If I have 10 seasons of Friends, can I have a separate folder for each season? Is Handbrake easy to use?
More importantly, is it super easy to use once everything is set up? Will my parents be able to access their library of movies as easily as they do stuff on Netflix via appletv? Is the technology not quite there yet?
Lastly, if none of the above is possible, is there a different method to this that could work?
For what it's worth, I have a very solid home internet connection. I'd be connecting the hard drive to the Airport Extreme in my room, and the appletv would be connected via ethernet to the Airport Express running on Bridge Mode in my living room.
I'm not totally inept when it comes to technology. It's just that a lot of this media server stuff, including all the guides I've read and so-called "beginner" tutorials, feature a lot of jargon specific to this topic, and it gets to be overwhelming trying to piece it all together.
tl;dr: I'm curious if there's a way to access files on an external hard drive connected to a router on an appletv via plex or other means. And also what this program called Handbrake is about.